What I Learned Today

In my class on Maker Spaces, we are discussing innovation: where it arises, how to encourage it, and how it manifests in different personal styles.

One article we read this week is It’s All Around You: Creating a Culture of Innovation, which offers several suggestions for inspiring innovation. These range from putting whiteboards at watering holes to creating innovation prompts to taking (and sharing) photos of unique things. The author even suggests that “libraries should have analog developer environments” akin to the dev spaces used for software and web prototyping. I’m not sure exactly how that would manifest as a physical space (one room set aside as the “dev library”?), but I was intrigued.

But what really caught my eye was the section in which the author discusses public involvement:

“People have a lot of personal attachment to their home libraries, and with that a need for customization. By bringing more of our patrons into the conversation, we can improve those feelings of involvement across the board, hopefully upping our usage in the process.”

I’m not convinced there’s a real idea here — what does it mean to “bring patrons in to the conversation” and how does that relate to creating an innovation cultur? — but it inspired new ideas in ME!

How can you make a public library your library?

What does “customization” mean in a library context?

How about these ideas:

1. Capital One allows you to upload your own photo to personalize the printed card. This is absolutely brilliant. It probably costs Capital One basically nothing. Card owners feel more invested and connected to their “personal” card — and probably more likely to use THAT card versus other ones in their wallet! Why not give library patrons the same option for their library cards?
2. If it’s your library, then they’re your books. (Literally so, in the taxpayer-supported sense.) Why not bookplates? I raised this idea at my public library as a thank-you recognition for our volunteers, and we tried it out. Volunteers get to pick any book, and we put a thank-you bookplate in that says “Volunteers: A Gift to the Community” and “So-n-so invites you to love this book.” Volunteers love it!
3. If it’s your library, you get to influence the hours. Can we poll patrons to find out what hours would suit them best?
4. If it’s your library, you get to pick the books. For most libraries, new books are selected and purchased by an expert librarian without direct patron involvement. Our library takes book suggestions from patrons, but the patron has to initiate that suggestion, and I suspect that many patrons don’t even know that this is an option. Further, there is no guarantee that the suggestion can or will be followed, and no timeline for when it might happen. Could we periodically put out a list of candidate books and let patrons vote? We could then feature the resulting purchases in a display to emphasize that “These are the books you chose!”

This is a brainstorm, so some of these ideas won’t be feasible or might not be effective. But let’s keep thinking creatively.

What would make you feel more invested in and engaged in your public library?

Today I made my annual pilgrimage to the Adult Spelling Bee in Long Beach. I saw several familiar faces amongst the other competitors as I climbed onto the hot, stuffy stage and prepared to do battle with the dictionary.

The first four rounds were pretty approachable:

1. fusty
2. nimrod
3. solstice
4. homily

On the 5th round, I was given “hawkshaw,” a word I’d never heard before. I asked for a definition and was told, “a detective.” Hmm. Was it “hockshaw” or “hawkshaw”? I asked for the language of origin and got “U.S. slang.” That clinched it. I figured “hawk” (hunt) was a more likely metaphor for a detective than “hock” (sell) and went with “hawkshaw.” And it was right!

(It turns out that hawkshaw is a reference to a comic strip character named Hawkshaw the Detective.)

On the 6th round, I got “paludal.” Yeah, if you’ve heard of this word before, kudos to you! The definition is “of or relating to a swamp; marshy.” I hesitated. Was it “pa-” or “pe-“? “Pelagic” is a word that refers to the ocean, which is watery. Was that close enough to marshy? What would a “pal-” prefix mean?

I ended up going for “palludal,” which was close, but no cigar. Later I learned that “palus” is Latin for “marsh.” Well, now I know!

That round was quite brutal, and by going out at that point I tied for 6th place with many other spellers (the same place as last year!). Some interesting and challenging words from the remaining rounds (an asterisk means I would have misspelled it) were:

• antimacassar
• primeval
• tetchy
• sanguine
• prurient
• *maquillage
• costive
• reify
• turpitude
• basenji
• degust
• phalanx
• *divagate
• prevenient
• contumacious — the winning word!

I’m already looking forward to next year. :)

I’m reading “The Ten Faces of Innovation” for my class on Maker Spaces. The book was written by Tom Kelley, the CEO of IDEO, a design firm that by definition is invested in being creative. Kelley begins by demonizing the Devil’s Advocate, which he claims “may be the biggest innovation killer in America today.” Critical thinking is good, but the DA is just too negative and squashes creativity.

Instead, Kelley identifies ten different “faces” (or roles) that people can employ to generate new ideas, solve problems, and otherwise innovate. Here I’d like to focus on just one, the Anthropologist, and the interesting view of the world that it encapsulates. (Possibly I find it interesting because it is so foreign to my usual modus operandi.)

Anthropologists gain inspiration by watching people. They observe them struggling with metro turnstiles or pushing that door instead of pulling it. In watching how people interact with the world, they learn not only what things are problematic but also what creative workarounds people already have devised. I figure an Anthropologist was behind the hands-free liftgate feature of my new car: he or she probably watched people approach their car with both arms full of stuff, then fumble or have to put things down to open the back. Now I can just swing my foot under the bumper and the liftgate opens automatically. Bingo!

An example of learning from workarounds might be the pave where they walk approach of planting the quad with grass, waiting a week while people walk the paths they want to walk, and only then pouring cement to create the sidewalks to match.

Kelley suggests an exercise to allow you to try out the Anthropologist face (or hat, or glasses, or whatnot):

“If you take a close look at your world, you’ll notice clever people playing the modern-day role of fix-it man. We’ve all seen the Post-it note with a helpful little instruction on top of the photocopier or the handwritten sign taped to the front of the reception desk.

To see how many exist in your world, try this exercise one day. Write down every fix you see at work, at home, or out on the town. Watch for things that have been duct-taped or bolted on. Look for add-on signs that explain what’s broken or how a machine really works.” (p. 29)

So, I did this.

My first observation was that post-its are rampant. The walls and the computer monitors in our Mars rover tactical operations room are filled with post-its. They include tips on how to disable the screen saver, how to “fix” the projected image when the refresh rate is wrong, who to call for certain problems, etc. In a meeting room, I found that the light switch was annotated with a sticker that says “Off: click down.” The light switch is a slider, which makes it seem like you can turn it off by sliding it all the way down. It’s dim enough at that point that it’s hard to tell whether it’s on or off. But instead you have to press hard enough to make it click before the light turns all the way off. I’m guessing that there was a lot of energy wasted before someone decided to just add the “click down” instruction. Solved!

In the break room, I found the following amusing sign taped to a cabinet above the sink:

“Please, only water-soluble liquids in sink.

Anything else will clog it.

Ok, so H₂SO₄ is water soluble,
but don’t put it down the drain either!”

Note that these are not just commands being inflicted on others. In most cases, they are work-arounds developed to address a design or use flaw. When the problem itself can’t or won’t be fixed, people step in to indicate how to deal with it. These are generous acts that may transpire between people that never meet face to face… but benefit regardless.

What fix-its have you seen today?

In my Cataloging class, we learned how to look up the authorized form of an author’s name. The Library of Congress maintains a Name Authority File that, for example, specifies that Samuel Clemens’s authorized name is Mark Twain. Then all searches on variants of his name can be redirected to this single standard form. Surprisingly (and as shown in this example), the authorized form is not necessarily the person’s legal name. Instead it is the name they most commonly use, or the form of the name they prefer to have used. For living authors, the first cataloger to add them to the database might call them up and ask what version they prefer (include middle name? middle initial? maiden name? etc.). For dead authors, it’s a matter of what they most commonly used when publishing works.

Interestingly, these records also track variant names that are NOT authorized (kind of a “do not use” list). For “Le Guin, Ursula K.” these unauthorized names include “LeGuin, Ursula”, “Le Guin, Ursula”, “Guin, Ursula K. Le”, and “Kroeber, Ursula.” Mark Twain has 22 of these.

So what do you do, given a list of Named Authorities? You look yourself up! (Select “Name Authority Headings” under “Search type” and specify the name as Lastname, Firstname)

Here is the record that came up for me. Finding yourself here is kind of, but not quite, as cool as finding yourself in Wikipedia. Apparently, someone cataloged the book I co-edited in 2008 titled Constrained Clustering: Advances in Algorithms, Theory, and Applications and added my name to the Name Authority File.

The charmingly formatted (for machine-readable purposes) entry looks like this:

HEADING: Wagstaff, Kiri Lou
000	 00564cz a2200145n 450
001	 7501355
005	 20080830073608.0
008	 080407n| acannaabn |n aaa
010	 __ |a n 2008025062
035	 __ |a (OCoLC)oca07727970
040	 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d NjBlaOCU
100	 1_ |a Wagstaff, Kiri Lou
670	 __ |a Constrained clustering, 2008: |b ECIP t.p. (Kiri Wagstaff) 
               book t.p. (Kiri L. Wagstaff) prelim. p. (senior researcher, 
               Jet Propulsion Lab. in Pasadena, CA)
670	 __ |a OCLC, Aug. 29, 2008 |b (hdg.: Wagstaff, Kiri Lou; Wagstaff, Kiri; 
               usage: Kiri Lou Wagstaff)
953	 __ |a jp02

and indicates that the preferred form of my name (field 100) is “Wagstaff, Kiri Lou” and that this was extracted from the Constrained Clustering book (field 670). Field 953 is a “local staff code” and indicates who created this entry — probably someone with the initials “J.P.” (why not just link to this person’s own Name Authority record?). J.P. did not call me to ask my preferred name form but instead justified this choice because that was how it was found on the “t.p.” He/she also included a bit of biographical information about my employment, possibly to aid future disambiguation with all the other Kiri Lou Wagstaffs out there.

So my name now enjoys a kind of newfound longevity that will outlast my own physical lifetime. Because I published a book, I now exist in the universe of persons that the Library of Congress encompasses. Kind of a weird thought.

Thanks, J.P.!